


Shift

by leigh57



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:10:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leigh57/pseuds/leigh57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Just in case anybody might be thrown off, NONE of the SVU stuff I'm putting up is new. I'm just popping these up here when I have a few minutes. I do it all for you, alwaysashipper;) <3</p>
    </blockquote>





	Shift

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case anybody might be thrown off, NONE of the SVU stuff I'm putting up is new. I'm just popping these up here when I have a few minutes. I do it all for you, alwaysashipper;) <3

On the rare occasions when she was home in her apartment, rather than out at a crime scene, breathing in latex, blood, and exhaust, Olivia almost always noticed the moment when the digital readout on one of her clocks switched from 10:59 to 11:00. Something about that click, the neat order of the ones and zeros, represented for her in miniature form the countless ways in which her life would never be what was considered ‘normal’ by most people.

 

At 11:00, primetime TV ended and the local news began – the shift from fantasyland to grim reality, although nothing on the news was actually news, which was why Olivia never watched it. She just knew that it was on, with the blonde anchors who were now disturbingly younger than she was, their voices grating, cheerful, and false. She couldn’t watch them in their coordinated suits, facing the camera and smiling while making the segue from a story about a raped and mutilated eight year old to one about an idiotic celebrity couple getting divorced. Olivia found that she rarely knew they’d been married in the first place, nor did she care.

 

She couldn’t watch primetime shows either. At one point she had tried, because the distraction from reality was always welcome after eighteen hours at the 1-6. But in the first place, she caught cases so often that she could never keep up with the plotlines, and in the second place, eventually it bothered her that on any given drama, carefully chosen music accompanied important life events. She had yet to experience a truly shitty life moment, only to discover the appropriate song playing at the appropriate volume in the background.

 

Yet she still noticed the clock turning from 10:59 to 11:00, the four different randomly ordered numbers changing into bilateral sets of two. It didn’t matter what she was doing either. Sometimes she was standing in the kitchen, eating cold leftover Indian food, and she’d notice the time on the microwave because the food was nasty and she should have bothered to heat it up. Other times she’d actually managed to get ready for bed early, and she’d be standing in front of the clock on her dresser, searching for the chapstick she could have sworn she’d dropped there before she went to take a shower. Or maybe she’d be in the living room, having a beer and aimlessly flipping through the L.L. Bean Christmas catalogue (although God knows why, because she didn’t have anyone to order presents for), and she’d glance up to see the clock on the VCR click to 11:00.

 

Most people, at 11:00, were probably brushing their teeth, checking on their kids, turning on the alarm, making sure that tomorrow’s lunches were packed, glancing at the evening news to see the summary of the next day’s weather, or peeling off their clothes to have satisfying, sleep-inducing sex with their significant others.

 

Most people.

 

Tonight, when Olivia watched the clock move from 10:59 to 11:00, she was standing with the fridge door open, wondering how she could be so hungry when she’d eaten an entire tuna melt and one of those double-serving bags of potato chips around 7:30. Nothing in the fridge looked appetizing, so she grabbed some flavored seltzer and pulled a glass out of the cupboard, holding it sideways as she poured so that all the carbonation wouldn’t disappear. She hated flat seltzer.

 

She’d been back at SVU for two weeks now, and she still wasn’t sure whether she’d made the right call. When Cragen had showed up, asking her to babysit Elliot, she’d said yes automatically, as if that was the only possible response she could give. At that point she’d tried to avoid wondering why Elliot always seemed to have that effect on her, why “no” didn’t appear to be part of her vocabulary when it came to him. Not for any extended period of time, anyway.

 

Now, as she stood there in beat-up sweats and a blue hoodie with some kind of weird stain on the right pocket, sipping her basically tasteless ‘raspberry’ seltzer, she had to wonder if she’d been wrong to give in to Cragen so easily.

 

The funny thing was that, since her return, Elliot had treated her better than he had for years. He didn’t yell. He didn’t get in her face. He brought her coffee just like always, and remembered how she took it. He did more than his half of the paperwork unless she made sure to cut him off first. He even listened without interrupting her when they disagreed on some detail of a case, which genuinely freaked her out. She wasn’t sure what he was trying to prove, but the persistent politeness was proving harder to take than the unyielding anger. At least she knew where the anger came from. This new thing, whatever it was, made her unsettled and jumpy and never quite sure what to expect.

 

11:02. She should go to bed. She should balance her checkbook. She should do another load of laundry. She should pull out her vibrator, since she certainly wasn’t getting any live action. Instead, she threw herself on the couch, leaned her head back, and for probably the four hundred and fifty-ninth time since the day she’d come back, tried not to think about the look on Elliot’s face when he’d mistakenly called Danielle Masoner “Dani.” His eyes had had this strange excitement in them. It made Olivia want to smack him. Or Dani. Or somebody.

 

She drained the last of the seltzer and set her cup on the floor. The apartment was unusually quiet. No sirens outside. No one was even honking at the moment, a fact which defied the laws of probability. The dishwasher hummed in the background and Olivia closed her eyes, drifting into semi-consciousness.

 

A sudden, insistent knocking jolted her back into wakefulness. She sat up and shot a look at the clock. 11:34. What the fuck? The phrase had barely made its way through her mind when she heard a voice, muffled by the door and by the volume required in an apartment building near midnight.

 

“Liv? It’s me. Open up.”

 

Elliot. Who else? She sighed, still hungry, still unsettled, and now fuzzy from her almost nap. “Coming.” She crossed to the door, quickly rubbing her eyes before she opened it.

 

Elliot stood there with a cardboard box in one hand and a six pack of Dogfish Head Chicory Stout in the other. He looked suddenly confused, as if he’d meant to be somewhere else but wound up here instead. She wanted to tell him that she knew the feeling, but instead she said, her voice scratchy with exhaustion, “What are you doing here?”

 

He didn’t seem prepared for the question, and he didn’t answer it. He held the box toward her. “I brought pizza. You still like mushroom, olive, and green pepper, right?”

 

 _No Elliot. I don’t eat green peppers anymore. Unless they’re organic. Do you know what kind of pesticides they put on those things?_ That’s what she should have said. That was the truth. But with him standing there in her door frame, so clearly uncomfortable and yet determined not to backtrack, the words wouldn’t come out. “Yeah. I’m starving actually.” She stepped back to make room for him.

 

“Why are all the lights off? Did I wake you?” His entire body stiffened, and he turned back toward the door. “I’ll leave you the pizza. I thought you’d still be up.”

 

Before she could stop herself, she touched his arm, and cursed inwardly when he almost flinched. She pulled her hand back instantly and stuck it in the pocket with the stain. “I was resting. It’s fine. Stay and have pizza.” She gestured toward the beer. “Do you want one of those?”

 

He looked at the door again.

 

 _Stay. I don’t care if we talk about the fucking weather. Say yes and stay for five fucking minutes._ She inhaled and exhaled three times before he replied.

 

“Yeah. Sure. But I’m gonna have a quick slice and go.”

 

 _Thank you_. “Okay.” Feeling inexplicably shaky, she took the beer from him and walked into the kitchen, popping the tops off two of them before she turned back toward Elliot. He’d set the pizza box on the table, but otherwise he hadn’t moved. He was still wearing his jacket.

 

_Does that mean you want to leave or you don’t know how to stay? Goddamn. When did this get so hard?_

 

She stepped towards him again, and held out her hand, careful not to touch him this time. “Let me hang up your coat. Then sit down at least long enough to eat, okay?” She watched the muscles in his arms move under his driver’s shirt as he shrugged out of his coat, realizing that five years ago, she wouldn’t even have noticed.

 

Okay, she would have noticed. But it wouldn’t have made her want to touch them. What the hell was going on with her?

 

As she hung up his coat, she could hear the couch rustling as he finally sat down, then the cardboard scratchiness as he opened the box. She maneuvered around the end of the couch and sat, careful to leave at least two feet of space between them. Grabbing her beer, she drank a good third of it without pausing.

 

“Thirsty?” Elliot lifted an eyebrow.

 

She ignored him and bit into a large slice of pizza. Even the green peppers tasted good – she had to admit it. She kept thinking of things to say, but they inevitably seemed inappropriate or simply dumb, and each time she aborted the idea before any sound came out. An awkward, horrifying silence settled over the room. As vehemently as she had wished for him to stay five minutes earlier, Olivia now wished that he were anywhere but here, staring at her, probably observing that she had mushrooms in her teeth. She could hear him chewing. How many times had she eaten in front of him without giving a second thought to any of it? 11:43. Unable to take it anymore, she cleared her throat and said, “Kids okay?”

 

He looked right at her then, for the first time since he’d walked in the door. For another few moments he said nothing. Finally he leaned forward and put his hands on his knees before he replied, his voice low and touched with more anger than she’d gotten from him since her return. “I don’t want to talk about the kids.”

 

 _Well shit then. What do you want to talk about? Did you show up here so you could listen to me chew? To check out the mascara tracks I’ve got going? Observe the mysterious stain on my hoodie? Fine then. No small talk._ “What happened with you and Dani?”

 

His eyes widened, and she could tell she’d scored a point in the ‘surprise’ column. “I don’t want to talk about Dani either.”

 

“Well it’s your turn then.”

 

“Why do we have to talk? We used to do this all the time without talking,” he muttered as he reached for another slice of pizza.

 

When she didn’t answer he dropped the pizza back into the box and said suddenly, “I’m gonna get another beer.” He got up and went into the kitchen, returning a second later with two more beers, extending one toward her. She wrapped her hand around it, noticing that the bottle was warmer where his fingers had been.

 

Elliot settled back into the couch, but this time the point in the ‘surprise’ column definitively went to him. He didn’t leave a quarter inch of space between their bodies. His shoulder brushed against hers, and the fabric of his jeans rubbed against the cotton of her sweats as he stretched his legs to touch the coffee table.

 

11:46. Something had changed. At work, they tried to keep up the banter that they’d once tossed around without thought, as if it would always be exactly that way. As if they could stop time and keep all of the shit that life brought down, the baggage of being adult humans with a million fucked up relationships and a whole messed up history, both together and apart, from making them different. But the banter was forced now, and they both knew it. Olivia missed it the way you miss someone when they die. You get used to it, but it never goes away. Not for a second.

 

Elliot leaned his head back, his shoulder shifting against her upper arm. “We have to figure this out. Not tonight. Sometime.”

 

Olivia didn’t know why, but her eyes filled. As if someone had pushed an invisible button that she hadn’t been able to locate, the tension drained from the room. Elliot got it. He knew. Of course he had no idea how to fix it, which made her bite her lip to keep from laughing even though her eyes were still stinging. “How about next Tuesday?” A small laugh escaped despite her efforts at suppression.

 

He turned his head slightly, his face inches away from hers. “I’m busy Tuesday.”

 

“Shut up.” She smacked his thigh.

 

“Maybe Wednesday. That could work.” He chuckled and tilted his beer up, draining it. “God I’m tired.”

 

“You look it.” Even in the semi-darkness, she could tell that his eyes were bloodshot, and while he’d only been there for a few minutes, his body was already pressed into her couch like a permanent fixture.

 

“Thanks,” he replied dryly. “I knew there was a reason I missed you.”

 

And there they were. Thrown out as an afterthought, but still there. The words she’d wanted him to say in the diner. In the elevator. Even though she knew that “I’d give you a kidney” meant exactly the same thing to him. She swallowed. “You want some ice cream? I have eggnog.”

 

“You eat eggnog ice cream?”

 

“Try some before you pass judgment.”

 

“Okay.” She stood up and walked toward the kitchen, rubbing the back of her neck. He called after her, “Only a small bowl though. I don’t trust you.”

 

 _Yes you do_.

 

She dug the ice cream scoop into the pale yellow cream, wondering if being around Elliot was always going to take this much energy now. When had she started thinking before she spoke, analyzing how he might react, worrying that he might misinterpret? Nothing was effortless anymore. It pissed her off, but she was mildly placated by the fact that at least he was here to revel in the awkwardness with her.

 

She returned to the living room carrying two large bowls of ice cream to find Elliot passed out on her couch, his breathing echoing heavily throughout the quiet room. After watching him for a second, she stuffed his bowl of ice cream back in the freezer and went into her bedroom in search of a blanket.

 

She resumed her place on the couch next to him and pulled the blanket over both of them. She had thought she was so tired, but now she felt almost caffeinated. Perfect. Reaching for the remote, she clicked on the TV, punching the mute button before any sound could escape. As she went to change the channel, she noticed the VCR clock.

 

11:59. She paused, watching the rhythmic blinking of the little colon that separated the two sets of numbers. After seven flashes, it read 12:00. She smiled, fully aware that exhaustion and stress were causing her to read excessive significance into meaningless numbers on a digital clock. Still, while the symmetry wasn’t as perfect as it had been at 11:00, there was still a certain balance.

 

She leaned back against the couch, her head just touching Elliot’s shoulder. Not perfect. Probably never had been. But it worked. She closed her eyes before the readout could hit 12:01.


End file.
